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Naming a character is like naming your first-born child. You agonize over very detail, even go so far as to pronounce the name under your breath to test the inflection. Lucky for you, you're more concerned with how it looks on paper rather than how it sounds spoken in...

In addition to wearing the Editor in Chief hat here at Outland Entertainment, I also write about pop culture in enough places that I've found it useful to follow the news. While this is particularly relevant for geek news, there are some headliners you just can't...

Outland Entertainment is please to announce a new look and edition for the anthology Blackguards, dividing the book into two volumes and including two never-before-seen stories. Blackguards, originally published by Ragnarok Publications, was a massive volume containing stories from some of the best dark fantasy and grim dark authors in the industry…

Dear Greg (in 1986), So you’ve just turned fourteen, and you’ve just entered your freshman year of high school. I wanted to send you...well, not a pep talk, exactly. You’ve never liked or trusted those; they’re treacherous, and too often they’ve been empty promises,...

This article by fantasy author Melanie R. Meadors first appeared Geek Mom: Geek Speaks...Fiction! Here, Melanie tells us about how she fought the voices (of the characters) in her head…and lost. When editor Marc Tassin invited me to write for the anthology, Champions...

Recently, Publisher Melanie Meadors and Editor in Chief Alana Joli Abbott got together to chat about a serial they're both reading: Born to the Blade. Alana: So, Melanie, how did you feel about Born to the Blade? Melanie: Wow, I have to say, I knew it would be cool,...

Outland Entertainment is pleased to announce they will be publishing a new collection of stories where protagonists’ moral compasses don’t always point north, and where villains are the heroes of their own stories.

Short stories are my first love. As much as I enjoy writing novels and novellas, I keep coming back to short stories. That’s why my first collection, The Voices of Martyrs, means so much to me. But as I’ve reflected on the long journey in getting here, I keep coming...

Dagon's Bones A fast and fun Lovecraft-inspired dice game played in the pubs and bars of Innsmouth. Roll the Bones, pray to Dagon. Utility Games, LLC is proud to announce our first game, debuting on Kickstarter, Dagon's Bones. Dagon's Bones can be taught in minutes,...

From Batman to Star Wars, Jeffrey has tackled numerous fandoms. Now, he faces the Warlock 5 Grid! Did you read Warlock 5 before joining this project? No, unfortunately I had never even heard of Warlock 5 before signing on to work on this project. I was given a .pdf...

So last October, I came across an ad looking for an art team for a new comic project called Dark & Day: Soldiers & Knights. Little did I know when I reached out just what a really cool project this was.

Here’s the basic premise –

A distant future Earth is now split into permanent Ends of night and day. The night/Dark is a culture of machines, technology, soldiers and logical science (science fiction style). The Day is a culture of magic, mythical creatures, knights and belief in wonder (fantasy style). Both sides fear the other and want to protect their people and their way of life.

Jake Grey, the creator, and I started talking and he began to share some of the concept art for the project he’d already developed and scope of the world started to come into focus. I was really floored. If I hadn’t been sold on the premise alone, seeing it brought to life and getting a sense of where Jake wanted to take the project really brought it all home. I knew that this had to be an Outland project.

After some discussion, we settled on Nicolas Giacondino to handle the pencils and inks, and Pedro Figue to take on the color work. We started with a couple test pieces, below –

We were all pretty happy with how the test pieces turned out, so we also brought in Ed Dukeshire to work on the letters. And with that, we had our team. Below is the cover as well as art for the first eight pages of the book.

Jake and I have gone back and forth a lot with this, making sure the art and timeline all works with this project. It’s been a real pleasure together! And expect more updates on this very soon.

Success!

It’s been a year or two ago at this point, and I don’t recall exactly how we connected. Whether it was through an ad I answered online or if he found us, we’ve now worked on several projects with Martin Smith of Attackosaur Comics.

Martin has not only been a pleasure to work with in both instances, he’s also an extremely talented writer and designer. His stories are pretty fun and tend to be short, self-contained books, which I think is great. He’s not weighed down with trying to stretch a story out over a long period of time and he can release each book all at once. I think that’s a great way to self-publish comics and I love the fact that you can pick up the book and get a full story.

Anyway, the first book we worked on together was one called Devil Executioner. It was a fun take on the horror genre and an entertaining story about exorcism. We handed everything except the writing and lettering. It’s a black and white book with pencils and inks from long-time Outland artist, Nicolas Giacondino, the logo design by Dustin Dade, and I handled the colors for the cover.

Check out the cover and some of the artwork below!

I actually had a lot of fun with the cover on this one – Nic, as usual, did a fantastic job on the lines. For the color, I wanted to really give it an ominous feel, which is why I chose a low level light source and the stark yellow background. I feel like it turned out pretty creepy!

If you want to read the full comic, you can purchase it directly from Martin here!

Success!

Another project we’ve been working on for the last couple years is a webcomic called Flight of the Binturong from writer Sal Crivelli. Outland was hired to handle the art for this project. Here’s a little bit about the project –

IT’S THE FUTURE

But don’t worry. A lot’s still the same.

No evil Empire. No oppressive theocracy. No galactic struggle. The government’s too bureaucratic for all that noise.

The Binturong is a mechanic ship with a crew of four. In the heyday of interstellar repairs, if your ship needed fixing, rigs like The Binturong would come to you, make repairs, and send you on your way. Nowadays, newer ships (along with most technology made in the last few years) have self-diagnosing AI that assesses, isolates, and self-repairs. It makes for safer, further space travel (and longer unemployment lines).

Flight of the Binturong is a once-a-week comic, which will update every Tuesday.

Inspired by the works of James Cameron, John Carpenter, and Joss Whedon, we’re hoping to bring you a comic that invokes that old feeling of cool, gritty space, while hopefully taking you on some new, exciting adventures.

Looking over the project, I decided it might be best to bring in somebody really good with hard sci-fi. So I suggested Nicolas Giacondino to come in and handle the pencils and inks. For colors, I pulled in Pedro Figue. I have to say – these two make a formidable team! Nic knows his stuff and Pedro did a stellar job on the colors – the pages really turned out great! See for yourself!

Be sure to head over to the site and check it out! The webcomic is ongoing and updates weekly!

Success!

Bleedback is an ambitious comic project that we are working on in conjunction with Scott Nihill and his company Embreate.

Scott was writing an epic sci-fi story and looking for help converting it into a 5-issue comic series. Outland came on in 2012 to manage the project. We handled all of the art including pencils, inks, colors, letters, and design. We’ve since partnered on the project and it’s become a joint venture. In 2013, we successfully funded our Kickstarter to print the first issue. As of July 2014, we are hard at work on issue 2.

So, a little about the project itself:

It’s New York, 2065. Both our dependence on and fear of technology has reached a critical moment. People are playing, fighting, shagging in virtual worlds, robots have become so advanced they might eliminate us. And then comes Bleedback … when activity in the virtual world seeps into the real world with sometimes terrifying consequences. Our central character Andrei, suffers the power of Bleedback firsthand.

The story follows Andrei, brilliant enough to captain any robotics lab but whose criminal record has barred him — on pain of serious prison time — from ever again wielding his gift. So he’s forced to work underground as a Breaker, a specialized hacker able to crack the most sophisticated government mandated robot restraints.

A bike mechanic by day, Andrei moonlights at The Beast, New York’s hottest nightclub, where every desire can be fulfilled … for a price. What free time Andrei has is spent keeping his daughter Angela out of the Global Revolutionary Movement (GRM) and on the right Life Path. Andrei’s comfortable life is turned upside down when a love bot he cracks goes haywire at The Beast. A shadowy military group snatches his daughter and he is hurled into the dark recesses of the global Robo slave trade.

Outland was hired to handle all the art chores for two short stories that would be collected into a single comic that would be handed out or sold at the various basketball events for Syracuse University. This was definitely a departure from the kind of work that we usually do and it was a fun assignment. I can’t claim to know much about basketball, so it was certainly a little different for me.

I grabbed Scott Godlewski to handle the pencils/inks and I did the colors. We were recently asked to do a new cover as well, and I tapped Brian Koschak to handle that.

Here’s a write up about the project along with a preview of some of the lettered pages.

I’ve known the guys over at The Th3rd World as acquaintances for quite a while, back when they used to host a forum on their site. They initially approached me about coloring the eight issues of the project earlier this year – Mike DeVito was very flattering about my color work when he approached me, going so far as to say that they even tried to approach the preview comic in sort of my style.

His kind words worked, I was on board.

As it turns out, Outland will not only be coloring the full series, but we’ll also be illustrating and coloring several of the later issues. I’ve tapped Chris Meeks to take the work on and I have to say, some of the pages he is turning in for the project are fantastic. Chris always does great work and it’s always fun to work with him.

I’ll be posting pages and previews of the work off and on over the course of the project, though we’re honestly not all that far from finishing this first series.

All of the issues will be available digitally via Comixology. There will also be a printed graphic novel that will eventually be available as well once we wrap the project up.

Finally, these aren’t standard issues – each one so far has been closer to 25-27 pages as opposed to the standard 22 pages per issue. So it’s a good price for the amount of story and pages you get.

Also, it looks like there will also be a movie coming out in August 2013! You can check out the preview here!

Success!

One of the first projects (and actually probably what really got this whole thing rolling) that we worked on as a company was for a very ambitious project for a company up in Canada called Foulplay Entertainment. This is a big project and has been pretty involved, but it has also been fun and I’ve enjoyed working with the project lead, Peter Gammell quite a bit.

The basic premise was for this to be a sort of interactive comic series marketed to iPad. The story revolves around a dystopic future and present day – with our main characters communicating through time to stop a major global catastrophe. Like I said – a very cool and fun idea.

The project came to me by way of Jeff Wamester (who actually did the pencils and inks on the covers for the project). Jeff didn’t have time to take the project on and suggested me as a possible alternative, which I was very grateful for. But, after hearing a little bit about the project, I decided it was probably going to be a little more I could handle on my own. Below are some of the covers that Jeff contributed and I colored.

So after some discussion with Peter, I decided to call on some of my contacts to help. I would do the layouts, color work, and letters for the project and we would outsource for the pencils and inks. This all worked out to our advantage – it allowed us to move a little more quickly through the material, at least that’s what we hoped moving into the project. I was able to recruit and work with a number of talented people, Chris Meeks and Shaun O’Neil among a variety of great artists.

To date, we’ve developed the first two chapters, the first four covers, and a myriad of concept art. Right now the project is on a short hiatus and will hopefully return to production toward the end of the year. If you want to check everything out in action, you can do so over at the Foulplay website.

I’m going to occasionally post up a variety of process art. I enjoy seeing how things come together and it’ll be nice to show a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes as well.

Below you can see our process on page two of chapter one. I did the layout, color work, and letters. Shaun O’Neil did the pencils and inks.

For me, I find it really enjoyable to see how another artist can take my layouts and flesh them out into a fully finished page. I think Shaun did a fantastic job with this page – he was able to take my layouts and really bring this future city to life. I also had a lot of fun doing the color work here – it’s always a great deal of fun to handle the colors, but it’s even more fun when you get to work with other talented creators.